Grounding

Sited on seven billboards along the Arbutus Greenway between Fir St and Burrard St, Vancouver.

Time, Reflection, Balance and Symmetry Expanded

Text by Dr. Mark Sealy

The turbulence of this world’s colonial history bangs in the brain a dreadful tune that is so loud and violent that it appears the only way out of its devastation is to keep singing the songs of revolution and redemption and to amplify, whenever possible, the voices of anti-colonial solidarity. When locked in the noise and violence of colonizing regimes, we get conditioned into a need to shout at this world’s unjust past. Shouting is an exhausting and taxing condition, a distraction that keeps us away from developing and implementing strategies of resistance that build new alliances and solidarities. The imperial swamp is difficult to exit and works to drown all thoughts on possible post-colonial living. 

Real justice is difficult to obtain; it is never given. It must be fought for, but we must be mindful to protect, build, and maintain the hard-gained political structures that allow all crimes, past and present, against humanity to be prosecuted. In our songs of redemption and our calls for civil, human, and environmental rights, we sometimes forget to listen to the quiet internal voice of the self. This voice (the voice of hope) helps us locate our dreams and to access the calm space of our minds. It aids acts of infinite possibility, generosity, and total recognition of all the people’s struggles in this world. History has taught us that colonialism is a vampire; it draws the lifeblood out of creativity and eats the soul. If we lose sight of our capacity to imagine and make things new, then the pain of the past is in danger of being the only soundtrack of our lives. Trapped in a temporal misery not created by us but by those who are motivated by greed! Now more than ever, we need our artists to make more than images, words, and music. Their crucial function at this conjuncture is to remind us that we must never lose sight of our capacity to feel, contemplate, and treasure all that is life.

Mónica de Miranda offers us an image repertoire of uplifting escape routes from underneath the weight of history, the burdens and the shackles of colonial time and all its tyrannical, bone-crushing metropolitan rhythms that form the dark arts of human enlightenment. de Miranda’s work invites the audience into unfamiliar and beautiful places. She disrupts the industrial colonial norm of things; there is within her work a radical conjoining of different temporalities, a placing of peoples in space that suggests the presence of ancestral l truth-seeking guardians is never far away both in spirit and body, unreachable by extraction and exploitation. Through de Miranda, contemplation and the art of silence are brought to bear, inner worlds released. As guardians, those standing fast across these works watch and wait for the audience to embrace their presence; they challenge us to deny their rightful place in history. Their purpose as representative subjects are to preserve and locate the critical senses of human exchange. Collectively, and within this labour of thinking and making, de Miranda’s landscapes of contemplation call on us to reflect on history’s difficult questions and invite the audience to own the prospect of equitable beginnings.

de Miranda desires to make the world new, differentiated in time but not isolated in spirit. Her subjects can only be described as the forever people because, through the archaeologies of her work, nothing remains buried, as the unseen is also felt. Here, we can collectively uncover all the lost words and images that might have once been said and seen by those denied the right of voice and recognition. Within this buried world, the difficult conditions that produce the feelings of tenderness are loud in our silence. With photography, you must stay still and silent, if only for a moment, taking time to look deep to allow the roots of connectivity to grow. Silence and stillness are part of the universe, balanced across all the conditions of lives lived, past and present. de Miranda is not preoccupied with borders and passports because land and atmosphere have a memory that must be heard, acknowledged, and respected. She rejects those obsessed with discovery, demarcation, and extraction. Welcome then to her eternal I, we, you, me. de Miranda refuses the notion of Eurocentric time being an unstoppable linear process. Instead, she circles back through and on colonial time to weave new narratives that produce dynamic forces of liberational thought, generating ways of being and using knowledge systems that reside beyond the printed page that both aid and reinstate the negated harmonies of this world. In this reimagined sense of community, there is no place for bordered states (of mind), only space and place for connections so that work can be done across the realities and experiences that influence the conditions of understanding post-empathy. Through de Miranda’s work, we can understand that we are forever bonded as cosmic entities, and if left unagitated, we can float forever in respectful, imaginative, and shared space.

Across de Miranda’s works, reflection is an ever-present now seen in the face of the Other, the place where responsibility is permanent. Here, the self can be seen, heard, felt, and shared. The stoic nature of this work does not cause fright; there is no screaming. Instead, these subjects demand a sense of pausing so that the time of our complex histories can be played back, processed, rewound, and rechannelled into a more honest understanding of the way we were/are and then magically and radically if we listen for long enough different frequencies might be heard that score a new harmonic for a different kind of living.

Presented in partnership with the City of Vancouver and sponsored by Pattison Outdoor Billboards.

The Arbutus Greenway Billboards are generously supported by Tara and Christopher Poseley.